Atari acquires unfashionable expert studio Digital Eclipse

What just occurred? Atari, a historic brand in the video game business that is now a shadow of its former self, is still on a buying spree attempting to find retrogaming-centered studios. The corporation has simply obtained Digital Eclipse, a famous developer operating in retro business since 1994.

Digital Eclipse currently introduced that it's miles now part of the "Atari circle of relatives." The studio that made Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration and The Making of Karateka, will apparently be tasked with assisting the brand, which turned into created through Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, build new enterprise possibilities for its subsequent 50 years.

Founded in 1992, Digital Eclipse firstly specialised in arcade sport ports for portable (Game Boy Color) and home consoles (PlayStation 1). The business enterprise became Backbone Entertainment after a merger in 2003, and then it went lower back to being Digital Eclipse after a group of former employees purchased the logo back in 2015.

Recent improvement efforts via the "new" Digital Eclipse are nevertheless focused on emulation with productions consisting of Blizzard Arcade Collection, Street Fighter: thirtieth Anniversary, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection. Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration kicked off a sequence of virtual, interactive documentaries with both archive fabric and right gaming experiences mixed in the equal package. Earlier this 12 months, Digital Eclipse released its new Gold Master Series of recreation documentaries starting with The Making of Karateka.

Digital Eclipse continues to be describing itself as a small studio with huge desires, even as Atari is a "legendary publisher" with a brand new blockchain-focused, retrogaming-heavy spirit. The two agencies will apparently work nicely together, the studio's professional press launch states, and they have a vibrant, unwritten destiny beforehand of them.

Digital Eclipse will no longer end up a studio completely focused on Atari properties and IPs, but. Even after being received, the company will nonetheless have the liberty to pursue its very own projects with different parties. After The Making of Karateka, the game developer nonetheless has a number of unannounced initiatives within the works that do not involve any Atari IP. Those projects will hold as deliberate.

The Californian studio will hold with its newly added Gold Master Series, telling "gaming history's maximum critical memories" through the interactive documentary format. Atari additionally desires this collection to retain, with out a regulations on destiny plans. The Digital Eclipse acquisition should be finalized in the coming days, with Atari's "initial consideration" of $6.5 million to buy the studio.